Book review:

Unrestrained
by Jennifer LeBlanc
Červená Barva Press
$7.00, 28 pages

Available atČervená Barva Press

Jennifer Blanc's chapbook, Unrestrained shows off her refinement as a poet and as a woman with great intuition. The best word to describe LeBlanc's writing is classy. I for one grow tired with some of the oddities of contemporary poetry, but Jennifer LeBlanc puts poetry back in the heart with this collection of poems. She is a hint of the modern Eastern European woman writers that I love, along with a dash of the keen innocense of some American female writers.

She writes with a confident pen, and complex emotion. Her themes are universal among everyone: self-image, wanting, hardships, mental hardships, etc. This collection of poems is all inspiring, all thought provoking. She is certainly the thinking-reader's poet. They are deserving of time, consumption and contemplation. They are to be devoured, rolled about on the fingertips, to examine. They appear to be soft poems, but they are quite the opposite, the images are soft and quiet, but the idea and the emotion behind them are roaring fires.

LeBlanc is not afraid of emotion, or insecurities, and it is so easy to relate to in her poem, "kiss me in the moonlight":

I stood still under the starless night sky,
calmed by an eerie summer chill,
and imagined...

just for one moment...

that I was more beautiful
and that someone like him would desperately want to

kiss me in the moonlight.

Jennifer's choice of words are haunting, and definitely sharp with precision, words such as "eerie" change the whole tone of the poem, and drew me to consider the relevance of the word in a poem that seems to be a simple poem of wanting.

Then, when I am feeling a little suspiscious already, a bit apprehensive in my own skin, LeBlanc spills out a darker voice in the poem "gauze and tombs (regarding Sylvia Plath's "Cut")", in which I again, as an attentive reader want to dig and dig at the bone of Jennifer's words:

her ghost hovers over

every

knife,
life of blood spilled on onion peels,
and thumb.

"straw, iron and air" may be my favorite poem in the chapbook. It also is a poem that seems to be a calm, settling poem, a poem that pats down the ruffled up dirt of Earth, but then, it raises its sharp claws:

it feels like the quietest murmur

pulled my heart out of my body
and pierced it with a straw,
iron and air.

She is not a woman that carelessly flings some words, thoughts or emotions on to a page, she caresses them, using intelligence when she writes. She is refreshing; she is real.

Jennifer LeBlanc is pursuing a B.A. in English at Regis College in Weston, Massachusetts. She won the Mary C. Bryan Award in 2009, and represented Regis College at the 2009 Greater Boston Intercollegiate Poetry Festival.